Facebook acquires Parakey

by ryan | July 20, 2007 at 10:39 am

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Facebook has already conquered our social lives, now it makes a move to dominate our technology as well.

Facebook Inc., the owner of the Internet's second most popular social networking site, said Thursday that it bought Parakey, a startup run by two of the engineers that helped build Firefox's popular Web browser.

It represents the first acquisition in Facebook's three-year history. Financial terms weren't disclosed.

The exact nature of Parakey is a little unclear, the company's website is vague as to what the platform will do.

Here's a little insight into it...but it's still cloudy to me.

To use Parakey, you'll need to download a small app onto your computer - which essentially turns your computer into a local server, thus enabling offline access.

This essentially means that data will be stored locally on the CPU and synchronized with online servers whenever you are online.

Ross describes Parakey as a WebOS that does what a traditional OS can do. It allows you to set up a site that can be shared by say all member of the family, and can be accessed from within a web browser. In order to make it work, you need to download a small application that turns your local machine into a server. You can decide which part of the Parakey site is viewable to the outside world.

Best of all, the part of Parakey that’s online communicates with the part of Parakey running on your home computer, synchronizing the contents of your Parakey pages with their latest versions on your computer. That means you can do the work of updating your site off-line, too.

The offline availability of the web applications is crucial and Ross seems to understand that.

According to Parakey designers, the goal is to integrate our online experience with out desktop experience. Parakey will be a platform of tools to work with use data on your hard drive, such as email, photos, and videos.